Hey Guys,
Well the market sure ended up having a huge down day yesterday. My futures positions from Monday are down, and one got close to its stoploss. The market is up a bit this morning from where it ended yesterday, but still down noticeably overall compared to where it started the week.
Despite that, my stock positions aren't hurting all that much. In fact at the time I'm writing this, I'm just under breakeven right now with the unrealized profit on my stock positions. That's pretty nice.
I also want to point out something interesting about my futures positions. For those of you who have learned my approach, you know that I like to use the ATR indicator as a mechanism for setting my stoplosses. The ATR represents the average amount that the price moves in a day (it typically takes an average from the last 14 days). I like this because it allows me to set a stoploss that is calibrated with the current volatility of the stock or contract. So when I took on an MES futures trades a couple weeks ago, back when the market was more calm, the stoploss was about 60 points away. With the futures trade I took this week, after the market has been making big volatile moves, the stoploss was about 100 points away. And yet the amount my account value would go down if I were to take a loss is still the same (as a percentage of my account value). The first trade called for more contracts since the ATR was lower, and the second trade called for less since the ATR was higher. This experience has given us a good glimpse of how that stoploss mechanism works.
I picked up a new futures position today. It was for the MT 71 futures strategy. The corresponding SPXL trade was also posted.
There haven't been any new stock or options trades yet today. The watch list is really thin. There just aren't a lot of stocks setting up right now for the pullback trade. I'm just patiently waiting and allowing the market to run its course.
If you have any questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you.